Something strange happens when you start cooking with really expensive ingredients that you haven’t paid for. Every meal seems a little more special, a little more hard-won (hey, I spent six hours digging this truffle out of the ground!).
In the case of truffles, every meal seems a little more divine, but also a little more hedonistic. The mind is challenged to artistry. The jeans are challenged to accommodate your zest for life.
And as the week stretches on, and the truffles begin to ripen, as they begin to give off their intoxicating sent and you are forced to play a waiting game to catch them at their perfect state, you start to get a little stressed out. You start to wonder if you aren’t living to eat the truffle, but living to use the truffle to the best of its abilities.
The truffle takes over your life (especially if you call it truffle week and decide to blog about it…)
It is as if you are afraid that you might waste the truffle, that you’ve somehow let that truffle down. Your greatest fear becomes nothing from the world outside — news of torture and war and suffering and poverty. The greatest worry of all is that this truffle will go bad and you will have stolen a treasure and let it molder away right under your nose.
I started this little truffle experiment as a way to interpret an Oregon ingredient in my own household — a kind of meet-and-great of Oregon’s best kitchens with my own. I think I accomplished that.
But in the end, I am happiest about the truffles that I gave away. So, lesson learned: next time, I’ll set more of them free.
So to sum up, here’s what happened to my truffles:
4 gifts to friends and neighbors
1 sprinkled on pizza (uninspiring, did not even warrant a blog post)
1 mixed into a vinaigrette
.5 very big truffle sprinkled on mushroom sauce for pasta
.5 very big truffle used for truffle ice cream
1 sprinkled on asparagus
1 mixed into mushroom risotto
1 truffle lost to decay 
1 sad, remaining truffle. What to do?
Simple Simon (Pie Oh My Blog) was wondering what the truffle powder we bought would be like on scrambled eggs. Now I’m wondering if that would be a good use for your sad remaining truffle . . .
Any use is better than letting it go bad…
But I might just make it into truffle butter and freeze it for my sister, who will surely come visit us in Oregon soon.
[...] including a raquetball-sized monster I dug up almost immediately — because if you read about my last truffle adventure, you know that I almost truffled myself out by taking on the challenge of cooking with them every [...]